Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center was ranked in the top three by U.S. News and World Reports of pediatric cancer facilties within the United States. It is also one of the largest pediatric cancer facilities that provides not only outstanding patient care, but cutting edge research and trials. They are a major referral center with 90% of their patients seen that are diagnosed with rare diseases do not live in the state of Ohio. The hospital's hematology department offers some of the most extensive care for newborns and children with Sickle Cell Anemia and their doctors have created treatments and protocols that are essentially the standard of care for these children throughout the country and globe.

One of the items we've made with our left over fabrics is chemotherapy bag covers - this is the main item inside our Hematology/Oncology Unit Surprise boxes! They are easy to make and do not require much fabric at all. Inside each box will be at least thirty chemotherapy bag covers divided between print for both boys and girls. We also include some other items that we thought would make great additions to the boxes as inspired by our own hospital visits, but also the outstanding idea from Miss. Maggie. The chemotherapy bag covers are inspired from Team Mathias' chemotherapy bag covers and we didn't have enough or their labels for all the bags we made, so on the rest we added the labels that we use for our hospital gowns. In total to Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center, we sent 32 chemotherapy bag covers.

Inside our surprise box to the unit was 18 boxes of children's themed Band-Aids, of course picked out and approved of by my kiddos. They always dread not having fun or "fancy" Band-Aids when they go to the doctor's office or to get lab work done and said that children who are in the hospital or have to see the doctor should be able to have a special Band-Aid. We will continuously accept donations of Band-Aids for these boxes, but also to send to children with their gown requests, so they can have a special Band-Aid of their own.

We didn't get an exact count on the number of stickers we sent in with the surprise box, but we included all these wonderful stickers to be given to the children on the unit or used to decorate their chemotherapy bags with as in the tradition of Maggie's Sticker Box that we collected and mailed out stickers too last year just before Christmas. We hope these help create many smiles on the unit and make the stays of each child a little more enjoyable. Stickers will continuously be collected as well for our boxes and to decorate our gown packages when mailed or to be sent with gown requests too. Decorating the packages is my kiddos' favorite part about helping with Gracie's Gowns, well that and helping with the "fun shopping" parts too.We hope the hematology and oncology departments love their surprise box - and that the children who receive any of the items love it even more and know that they are special and precious no matter what the diagnosis may be...they are more than what's typed on that piece of paper.

A huge THANK YOU to everyone who helped make this project possible and we can't wait to get our second box together and mailed out to another Pediatric Hematology/Oncology Unit around Christmas time. Nina, thank you especially (you and the girls) for sewing up the chemotherapy bag covers for us to distribute.